Julia Gillard
’s announcement of a September 14 election puts the public service in a challenging situation until the writs are issued on August 8 and the traditional caretaker period kicks in.

Until then, the bureaucracy must maintain its nerve, putting itself on an election footing while taking care of ordinary business, which will include some big policy development and implementation tasks, particularly the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Gonski schools reforms.

Announced as another disaster relief operation following the floods is making demands on a range of agencies, not least the Department of Human Services, it will also be a long-range test of the impartiality of the bureaucracy. And no agencies can forget that they are only halfway through feeding the government’s voracious 4 per cent efficiency dividend on running costs this financial year.

Asked what he expects from the public service during an election year, Minister for the Public Service and Integrity
Gary Gray
told The Australian Financial Review, “The public service should perform to the highest standards regardless of the political cycle and it’s been a fact that the last two years have been some of the toughest years in modern day Australian politics because of the combative nature of federal parliamentary politics."

But he says the public service has been able to stand above it all and do its job as well as possible.

“Not only does it do that in a broad policy context, but some of the issues that have become the issues of combative exchanges in the Parliament [have] involved necessarily hard impartial work by the public service and I expect no more and no less," he says.

“Our country is well served by the public service performing that way."

He acknowledges there has been generational change in the lower ranks of the public service in the last six years, but says at senior levels there are still many who served under the governments of
Paul Keating
,
John Howard
,
Kevin Rudd
and Gillard. “So they’ve seen a lot of change. When governments change, the attitude towards the public sector changes. But more important than that, because it’s only six years since the Howard government, there’s real live practical knowledge and institutional understanding of how to behave – from 2007, during the difficult weeks of 2010 [and] through the swirl of politics of the last 2 ½ years, so I’m very comfortable that right through the system the good principles, good values and good behaviours of the Australian Public Service will see it through and enhance it [both] doing its work impartially and doing the work that [it] does to support government and governance."

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Gray, whose father-in-law, the former senator
Peter Walsh
, was
Bob Hawke
’s finance minister and arguably the toughest toe-cutter ever, is an enthusiast for the public service. “I just have tremendous regard for what the APS does."

He does not deny that public service jobs will remain a bone of contention, with the Community and Public Sector Union keeping up the pressure on the one hand and Opposition Leader
Tony Abbott
wanting smaller government and his finance spokesman
Joe Hockey
sticking to his vow to abolish 12,000 jobs in Canberra in the first two years.

And while the government has softened its stance on public service jobs – as well as on the surplus ­–­ few in Canberra would think this signals easing of the savings pressure on departments.

But Gray draws a distinction between the government and the Coalition, not just on jobs but on public service purpose.

“Even though we’ve put in place the highest efficiency dividends, even though we have squeezed the public sector to reduce the costs of running [it], we’ve always sought to do that by focusing not on jobs but on costs," he says. “The whole idea is we will see increased areas and we’ll see decreased areas. We know now the building of the [National Disability Insurance Scheme] [NDIS] will require acute judgments on resource allocations; people will need to be shifted into those areas of public administration that will focus around the NDIS."

He compares this approach with the Howard government’s years of moving public servants into areas around its green agenda while the public service grew again after years of coalition cuts.

(In mid-1996, just after Howard came to power, there were 143,193 staff in the APS; this dropped to 113,530 in mid-2000 but by mid-2007, just before Rudd took power, it was back up to 155,424, or 2231 more than during the Keating years. In mid-2012 it was up to 168,580, a rise of 13,156 under Labor.)

“I think what you’ll continue to see under our government is [that] the public service will grow at the same rate as the population. And what you’ll also see is that shift in the weight of people towards the policy priorities of the government. NDIS, Gonski, they all sit very high in the priorities of the government as we go through the final year of this term and into the term we’ll start at the end of this year," Gray says.

At least we now know when the jury will be out for that particular verdict.